Japan Doubled Domestic 'Stealth's
7 June, 2017

Japan rolled out the first F-35 (AX-5 "79-8705") assembled at Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' F-35 Final Assembly and Check Out (FACO) facility in Nagoya on Monday. Lockheed Martin has delivered four F-35As from its Fort Worth line to the Japan Air Self Defense Force, but out of 42 aircraft purchased the remaining 38 F-35s will be assembled in at the Nagoya FACO. AX-5 will be used for flight training purposes. The US Department of Defence selected the Nagoya FACO facility in 2014 to conduct heavy airframe and engine maintenance for the North Asia-Pacific region.

The Mitsubishi X-2 Shinshin (formerly the ATD-X) is a Japanese experimental aircraft for testing advanced stealth fighter aircraft technologies. It is being developed by the Japanese Ministry of Defense Technical Research and Development Institute (TRDI) for research purposes. The main contractor of the project is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Many consider this aircraft to be Japan's first domestically made stealth fighter. ATD-X is an acronym for "Advanced Technology Demonstrator – X". The aircraft is widely known in Japan as Shinshin (mind), although the name itself is an early code name within the Japan Self-Defense Forces and is not officially in use.